The Mummy Returns (120 mins, 12) Directed by Stephen Sommers; starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz
Tigerland (101 mins, 18) Directed by Joel Schumacher; starring Colin Farrell, Matthew Davis
Rien à Faire (105 mins) Directed by Marion Vernoux; starring Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Patrick Dell'Isola
Inbetweeners (86 mins, 15) Directed by Darren Paul Fisher; starring Johnny Ball, Philippa Forrester
Nothing exceeds like success. Two years ago, The Mummy (from the Valley of the Kings via Shepperton Studios) made a mint; now The Mummy Returns is coining an even bigger fortune, the first whopping blockbuster of the American spring, pummelling Bridget Jones into submission. Is Two, then, better than One? No, but it is the masterwork of International Light and Magic Inc, unchallenged wizards of visual effects. This digital Mummy leaves Gladiator for dead. If you can turn a computer game like Lara Croft into movie, you can also turn a movie into a two-hour computer game.
What's going on here? Silly question, one beyond any computer's figuring. Our square-jawed ex-legionnaire from last time (Brendan Fraser) has married his sexy Egyptologist, Rachel Weisz, and produced a precocious, obnoxious son who keeps landing mum and dad in mortal peril (usually in mid-snog). There's a berserk curator from the British Museum (Alun Armstrong) idiotically busy raising the mummified priest Imhotep from the dead, together with Immy's dastardly mistress, Anck-Su-Namun. Arnold Vosloo has kept himself in shape; Patricia Velázquez, a new Anck on this block, manipulates her belly button better than any software. Added for luck, there's a similarly appalling second villain, the Scorpion King, played by a WWF wrestler called the Rock. Everybody grows frantic trying to prevent something they call 'the next Apocalypse', though they seem, bizarrely, to have survived the first Apocalypse pretty well. Summon the Raiders of the Lost Plot.
Nothing in Stephen Sommers's screenplay makes - or is intended to make - any sense. Nothing in Sommers's direction assists understanding. But Steve, raking in the loot, can afford to shrug and grin. He can get on with concocting episode three.
There are, to be sure, some countervailing virtues. Weisz herself, fit, fetching, intelligent, gets a bigger slice of the capering and relishes it so clearly that you can see a Bond film offer in the post; Freddie Boath's eight-year-old son has an unsinkable talent for irritation. (Kidnapped by some monster or other, he keeps demanding: 'Are we there yet?') But such moments of pastiche humanity are few and far between.
So to three less bankable curiosities. Joel Schumacher is one of Hollywood's glibbest, sheeniest directors, last glimpsed retiring Batman to the rest home for clapped-out series. Why should he want to try a hand-held camera job about raw recruits training for jungle war in a Louisiana boot camp 30 years ago? Come to that, why should a modern superpower hooked on the various progeny of Star Wars be expected to care? Most of its cinema audience wasn't born when Vietnam ended; even America's weird fascination with its own military humiliations needs a rest (at least until Pearl Harbor the week after next).
Sure enough, then, Schumacher's Tigerland has been a commercial bomb. Unfair? Just a little. It's grainy but slick, skating the surface of life 'in the second most horrible place on Earth', always choosing the cheapest angle and easiest cop-out. But a young, unknown cast - Matt Davis as a self-consciously literary narrator, Shea Whighan as a psycho - put up a vigorous, passionate show, and there's one landmark performance to cut out and keep. The hero of this piece, around whom all else revolves, is a smouldering Texan called Roland Bozz. Tigerland is his story, of his move from rebellion to responsibility. Enter one young Dubliner profiled in The Observer last week - Colin Farrell, late of Ballykissangel and the Donmar Warehouse. He is short, dark and handsome and his accent would fool George W. Bush, but there's something beyond that which shouts out 'star'. A magnetic presence, you instinctively follow him across a crowded screen. The studios, beating his drum, are already talking about the next Brad Pitt, but they sell Farrell short. He has, on this showing, the gift of volcanic, brooding stillness. I haven't seen that since Steve McQueen.
Rien à Faire has languished in the can too long since the 1999 Venice Festival. Call it A Man, a Woman and a Supermarket Trolley. Patrick Dell'Isola is a 41-year-old middle manager laid off in recession and drifting disconsolately, pursued by his own work ethic. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi has been out of work for much longer - 14 months - and sunk into a bored pit of inadequate domesticity. He's desperate to be upwardly mobile again; she's always settled for menial jobs to keep her kids and union official husband, Sergi López, going. Where do they go to fill their empty days? To that great community theatre of twenty-first century life, the local supermarché. They meet at the meat counter, become wine buyers and friends, then lovers, bound by loneliness and inadequacy. But what happens if one of them gets a job?
It's a neat enough little hypothesis, full of potential resonances, and Marion Vernoux tackles it with sympathetic diligence but, alas, there's not much left in the basket by check-out time. The story doesn't wind up - it winds down predictably. And neither Dell'Isola nor Bruni Tedeschi ever truly convince. He's too smooth, even in his despair, and she's too hangdog, such a tremble-lipped victim, such a haystack mess that you never believe she's consumed by love. Why go on interminably about putting on too much weight when you can't be bothered to run a comb through your hair before rushing off for the next quick tryst? López, as ever, is wonderful, this time in a phlegmatic supporting role. Next time round, let him push the trolley.
Which leaves Inbetweeners, a first Britpack venture from somebody called Darren Paul Fisher (as in Paul Thomas Anderson, or indeed Francis Ford Coppola). Darren Paul, short on years but long on confidence, claims it's the first film ever about 'the British university experience', which apparently consists of six spotty lads and six sniggering girls boozing, drugging and looking for their lost virginity. Daily Mail readers' kids in witless stinker. The young cast of unknowns and barely knowns don't lack experience - Finlay Robertson's head pimple has starred in Macbeth and a Nicorette ad - but Fisher films them like a flat home movie. Redeeming features? No Lottery money, for once, poured into this hole. Indeed, not much money of any sort. Oh... and another great UK first. This was billed as the big screen debut for Anthea Turner, but Universal, in its infinite compassion, left her on the cutting-room floor, free to rise again to the higher artistic challenge of Celebrity Big Brother .
